The dancer, the singer, the cellist ... creative collaboration

Legendary dance choreographer Bill T. Jones and TED Fellows Joshua Roman and Somi didn't know exactly what was going to happen when they took the stage at TED2015. They just knew they wanted to offer the audience an opportunity to witness creative collaboration in action.

The Shadow Ballet: Dancers & Drones

Wired: 

DRONES WILL CHANGE how we ship goods! They’ll revolutionize search and rescue! We hear about these futures all the time. It’s less often that we’re asked to consider how autonomous flying machines might be used for more poetic ends. But, as with any technology, drones can be just as invigorating for art as they are for commerce. “Shadow” is the just the latest example.

Is Technology Making Us Better Storytellers?

Technology has changed way we tell stories, but has it changed the quality of storytelling? At this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, a group of writers, artists, and producers weighed in. "We're revisiting the same explorations of the soul that have been going on for hundreds of generations," says House of Cards showrunner Beau Willimon. Other panelists include Michael Eisner, Catherine Burns, Jay Allison, Paula Kerger, Jon Lovett, Yoni Bloch, Pete McBride, and Hari Kondabolu.

The Paradox of Art as Work

A. O. Scott, The New York Times:

In the popular imagination, artists tend to exist either at the pinnacle of fame and luxury or in the depths of penury and obscurity — rarely in the middle, where most of the rest of us toil and dream. They are subject to admiration, envy, resentment and contempt, but it is odd how seldom their efforts are understood as work. Yes, it’s taken for granted that creating is hard, but also that it’s somehow fundamentally unserious. Schoolchildren may be encouraged (at least rhetorically) to pursue their passions and cultivate their talents, but as they grow up, they are warned away from artistic careers. This attitude, always an annoyance, is becoming a danger to the health of creativity itself. It may seem strange to say so, since we live at a time of cultural abundance and flowering amateurism, when the tools of creativity seem to be available to anyone with a laptop. But the elevation of the amateur over the professional trivializes artistic accomplishment and helps to undermine the already precarious living standards that artists have been able to enjoy.

[...]

But it is, nonetheless, a job. The risk in separating the labor of making points and differences from its worldly reward lies in losing sight of the fact that it is labor, and therefore has a value that is material as well as abstract. In March, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report estimating that more than two million American workers identified themselves as artists, and noted that they had, since 2008, undergone the same bumpy, piecemeal recovery as other workers. An earlier report, from 2011, calculated that “the production of arts and cultural goods and services contributed $504.4 billion to the U.S. economy,” or 3.25 percent of gross domestic product. It may be relevant to note that the single largest category of artistic endeavor was advertising — a sign, perhaps, that the distinction between art and commerce is finally moot — but the upshot is that what artists do represents a significant quantifiable share of the nation’s wealth.

Maya Angelou's Wisdom Applied To Creativity

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

For the past few days that quote by Maya Angelou keeps popping up everywhere. In blog posts, TED talks, marketing books, student design work, branding podcasts, everywhere, because it reveals a simple truth, it is all about how you made them feel.